Symantec Snaps Up Revivio

Symantec said in a statement that it has acquired "substantially all of the intellectual property of Revivio" and has offered jobs to the startup's core engineering team.

Symantec launched a "near-CDP" offering a year ago, but Revivio's technology will allow it to offer enterprise-class CDP products in less time than it would take to develop the technology in-house.

The acquisition gives Symantec "a significant time-to-market advantage in launching a Continuous Data Protection (CDP) and Replication offering that will be integrated with NetBackup as well as sold as a standalone continuous data protection and replication offering," Symantec said in a statement. "CDP will give Symantec's enterprise customers the ability to restore their critical data at any point of time by logging all changes to disk."

"Revivio had a good story," said Greg Schulz, founder and senior analyst at StorageIO, "but it was too targeted to a specific audience  or unfortunately, that is the way the story came across  so that many environments felt the technology was out of their reach and not applicable to their coarser RTO and RPO (recovery time and recovery point objectives) requirements."

"There is a much larger market for not so fine-grained, and even what some would call near-CDP, such that different applications and data can be supported with the right level of protection and recoverability to meet their specific RTO and RPO needs," said Schulz.

"The real CDP market is one that is as varied as service requirements that need to be supported, ranging from complete transactional integrity with multi-volume consistency to sub-second data capture to coarse granularity of minutes or hours, depending on what a particular business-specific application's RTO and RPO needs are."

Schulz sees the acquisition as the beginning of a trend. He predicted that CDP, backup, replication, mirroring and snapshots will "converge to support a more dynamic and unified comprehensive data protection approach."